During the Kickstarter campaign for my upcoming book, India Street Lettering: A Journey through Typographic Craft & Culture, Sam Roberts of Better Letters Magazine, i.e. BLAG, kindly offered to help spread the word by inviting me to write an essay for the BLAG website. The result was a piece about how my ways of seeing and learning from sign painting have evolved. Looking past the clichéd lens that dominates popular narratives about street lettering in India has helped me twofold: it forced me to search for other mediums, visual languages and crafts that dot India’s urban landscape, and build an archive here that represents lettering beyond the hand-painted; and it has led me back to a deeper appreciation for hand-painted lettering from the viewpoint of individual styles, functional requirements, and local tastes.
The piece took on a bit of a life of its own when it topped HackerNews in early August.
Even better, Michael Bundscherer translated the essay into German for the Typographische Gesellschaft München blog.
